Revisiting the Notorious "Report #49": Gender, Race, and Encounter in Burma, 1944

Speaker: AMY STANLEY, Wayne V. Jones II Research Professor in History, Northwestern University 

Moderator: ANDREW GORDON, Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History, Harvard University

Summary:

In September of 1944, an interrogation report written by a Japanese-American interrogator named Alex Yorichi caused a minor frenzy among Allied soldiers posted on the border between India and Burma. The report described twenty Korean “comfort girls” and two Japanese comfort station operators who had been captured after the fall of the northern Burmese town of Myitkyina to Allied forces. Nearly fifty years later, declassified and rediscovered in the U.S. National Archives, Report #49 again caused a commotion, and ever since it has circulated in scholarship and among activists, employed variously as evidence, artifact, and ammunition. This talk looks through and beyond the notorious document, using Japanese and English memoirs, diaries, and oral histories to reconstruct the encounter between Korean women and Nisei intelligence officers, many of whom had come directly from American incarceration camps. Using the strategies of microhistory, which emphasize specificity and contingency, it contemplates what is lost when a document becomes so famous that it obscures its own subjects.

Reischauer Institute Japan Forum co-sponsored by the Weatherhead Center Program on US-Japan Relations